SSM Defining the Scrum Master / Team Coach Role Practice Question
A SAFe Scrum Master / Team Coach is helping a new Agile Team establish healthy working agreements during its first Iterations. The team keeps interrupting each other, skipping refinement, and letting Stories sit in progress for days. Which TWO actions best reflect the Scrum Master / Team Coach role in building the team's self-management? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is equating stronger management controls with faster team maturity, when self-management grows from team-owned agreements and reflection.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Coach the team to create and own working agreements that define how they collaborate and limit work in progress.
Building self-management means helping the team define its own norms and reflect on its behaviors so improvements come from within. Coaching the team to own working agreements that limit work in progress and facilitating reflection on their impact both develop lasting capability. Imposing enforced rules, appointing an approver, or escalating for oversight all substitute external control for the team's own accountability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Write a detailed set of process rules and enforce them through daily compliance checks and status reporting.
Why it's wrong here
Imposing rules and policing compliance creates dependency and undermines self-management. The team would follow the process only under supervision, and the behavior would revert once monitoring stops. A SAFe Scrum Master / Team Coach builds the team's ability to govern itself, not a compliance regime.
- ✓
Coach the team to create and own working agreements that define how they collaborate and limit work in progress.
Why this is correct
Working agreements are a core self-management tool that let the team define its own norms for collaboration and flow. When the team authors and owns them, adherence comes from shared commitment rather than imposed rules. This directly addresses interrupting, skipped refinement, and stalled Stories while building the team's capability to regulate itself.
- ✗
Assign a senior developer to review every Story and approve it before the team can move it forward.
Why it's wrong here
A single approver creates a bottleneck and contradicts the team's collective ownership of quality and flow. It also fails to teach the team how to self-review and limits work in progress appropriately. The coach should strengthen the team's shared standards rather than introduce a gatekeeper.
- ✗
Escalate the team's immature behaviors to the Release Train Engineer and request closer management oversight.
Why it's wrong here
Escalating for oversight treats a normal team-development issue as a governance problem and invites external control. New teams commonly struggle with collaboration and flow; the coach's job is to develop them, not to report them. Management oversight would reduce the team's ownership and slow its growth toward self-management.
- ✓
Facilitate the team's reflection on the impact of their behaviors and help them choose improvements they will hold themselves to.
Why this is correct
Facilitating reflection helps the team see the consequences of their behaviors and decide what to change. Because the improvements are chosen by the team, they carry ownership and are more likely to stick than externally imposed rules. This is the essence of the Scrum Master / Team Coach role in developing self-managing teams.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Scaled Agile exam blueprint
This SSM practice question is part of Courseiva's free Scaled Agile certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SSM exam.